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1) The Landlord's Terms - a Derasha
Why does Shemitah belong in the company of murder, adultery, and idol worship? Chazal list exactly four sins whose punishment is galus from Eretz Yisrael: those three cardinal aveiros, and the failure to keep the Shemitah. Rashi makes the same connection, but it seems wildly out of place.
Out of place… Unless we've been misunderstanding galus all along.
We probably relate to galus as anti-Semitism, poverty, and wandering. But galus can be rather comfortable — look at what Jews have built in exile: communities, institutions, shuls, yeshivos. And yet we daven every day that it should end. Why? The parshah itself offers the answer, by juxtaposing national galus with the galus of the Eved Ivri. The slave lives well; his adon provides for him and his family! He can accomplish, succeed, and even thrive. But what he creates is not truly his. Ultimately, one day, he will return home, and what does he have of all he built? That is the punishment of galus. Not hardship, but (perhaps worse) illusion.
Eretz Yisrael is the antidote. It’s not just a safe place to live, but a home, where Hashem grants His people a genuine sense of ownership and eternity. The question is who merits it.
Ironically, it is the person who already knows he doesn't. The one who understands that everything is a rental, a temporary gift from Hashem to be used in His service, can safely be trusted with a measure of real partnership in what he has. But the person who forgets, who begins to believe his possessions are truly and permanently his own — such a person needs the lesson of galus.
And that is precisely what Shemitah teaches. The land is Hashem's. We reap its benefits, use it as we wish, but it is not ours. And when He asks for it back, we return it. Shemitah is the lived, embodied acknowledgment that we are renters, not owners. Those who internalize that truth merit staying. Those who violate Shemitah — who act as if the land is theirs — simply need to learn the lesson somewhere else.
The four sins that cause galus are not so different after all. Each, in its own way, is a denial of Hakadosh Baruch Hu's ultimate sovereignty. Shemitah is simply the most elegant expression of that denial, as well as its cure.
2) Shemitah and Emunah - a Derasha
The parshah opens with a seemingly extra detail: "Hashem spoke to Moshe on Har Sinai." The Sifra is immediately troubled. Was Shemitah the only law taught at Sinai? Why single it out?
The Chasam Sofer offers a technical answer: unlike tzitzis or tefillin, the halachos of Shemitah weren't applicable until the Jewish people entered and settled Eretz Yisrael – more than half a century after Sinai. One might assume they were transmitted later, not at Matan Torah itself. The Torah clarifies otherwise.
But R. Uziel Milevsky (Ner Uziel) presses deeper. Shemitah is singled out not merely to protect its historical credentials but because emunah is its very essence. Chazal (Shabbos 31a) teach that faith in God is the bedrock of an agricultural society. For forty years in the desert the Jewish people had lived miraculously – the mann fell, clouds guided them, needs were met without effort. But then they entered the Land, and that era ended! Now they would plow and sow and harvest and be asked, at the peak of their agricultural cycle, to simply stop, to trust that the sixth year's yield would carry them through the seventh. In other words, they were asked to demonstrate, in the most tangible way possible, that the land and its produce belong to God alone.
They failed. The exile, R. Milevsky writes, was not merely punishment – it was the external manifestation of an inner connection that had gone awry. A people who could not trust God with their grain could not hold the land He had given them.
What is most powerful is his penultimate paragraph: “In truth, more than a response we may give to other nations, God's message is a guarantee for the Jewish people themselves. ‘If your faith in the Lord is steadfast, if you believe that “the earth is Mine alone” — to give to whomever I please — then the other nations will believe it as well. It is only your faith that the Holy Land belongs to you that convinces the nations of your rightful claim to the land. On the other hand, when your conviction that you own the land is weak — due to a lack of faith on your part — the nations too will question the legitimacy of your claim and will make claims of their own.’”
3) For Mother's Day
With Mother's Day this weekend, Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik's "The Jewish Mother: A Theology" is essential reading. The piece opens with one of halacha's most puzzling anomalies: Jewish identity follows the mother, but in basically every other area of Judaism, we go after the father. What gives?
Judaism, unlike Christianity, is not merely a faith — it’s a family! And no familial bond is more primal, more physical, more unbreakable than that between mother and child. Drawing on the Rav's Family Redeemed and sources ranging from Sota to Shir HaShirim, he builds a compelling theology of motherhood: why the Shechina is immanent and feminine, why a son honors his mother more naturally than his father, and why it is the women of each generation — from Mitzrayim to today — who have most fiercely guarded Jewish continuity.
4) Parperet - Three Ways Home
The word geulah does a lot of work in Parshas Behar – and we turn again to R. Milevsky (also in Ner Uziel), who wants us to notice. The Torah calls the restoration of hereditary land to its original owner an act of geulah, of redemption. Why that word? It's the same word we use for the redemption! Rabbi Milevsky argues this is no coincidence. The two geulos are structurally identical, and the Torah is teaching us something precise about how our capital-r Redemption will arrive.
When poverty forces a Jew to sell his land, the Torah outlines three paths back. The owner himself may improve his fortunes and repurchase it. A close relative may step in and redeem it on his behalf. Or, if neither occurs, the yovel arrives and the land returns automatically, regardless of circumstances.
R. Milevsky maps this directly onto our galus. If we act righteously and transform ourselves, we earn our return: the owner reclaims what is his. If we lack that merit entirely, God redeems us through zechus avos: our holy ancestors serve as the go'el, the redeeming relative. And if we are neither fully deserving nor fully undeserving? The final appointed time arrives – the six-thousandth year – and redemption comes anyway, as inevitable as yovel.
5) See last year's Chomer Here.
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